A city building game that uses microscopic models to vividly simulate the organism of a city arising from the interactions of millions of individuals. People on the move, businesses in trade, neighbourhoods changing. Each inhabitant struggling, adapting, making life choices. The city evolves, the city grows. The city is us.
See and inspect all aspects of city life, across many scales of time and space.
Shape your city by sketching detailed project plans for infrastructure and zones. Implement projects, decide on budgets and make government decisions. Citybound has an ambitious vision and is developed as a largely one-man open-source effort. Follow my creation process on the DevBlog and the Citybound community on Reddit. If you are brave, try out the experimental live builds. Citybound is proudly community-funded.
Game Features Micro-Economy Simulation In Citybound, every single household (a family or a business) is individually simulated. Each household has a home, and the daily activities of its family members or employees are driven by the resources the household needs and offers. Each household maintains a precise real-time inventory of its resources, which not only include tangible goods like groceries, raw materials, or money, but also intangible concepts like sleep, health, recreation, work-force, touristic interests or business services. Economic patterns arise directly from household interactions. To fulfil its human or business needs, each household tries to find attractive "trade-partners" for each resource, factoring in price and quality differences, but also local reachability based on transport conditions. Households re-prioritise their needs throughout the day, leading to natural patterns of commute, shopping or logistical transport trips. Future work: Pre-simulating local trade conditions to determine attractiveness of real estate, thus influencing immigration, development and city growth. Scaling the system to high-density buildings and large populations in the millions. Details & Inspiration ▾ The original inspiration for simulating cities at the level of individuals and their interactions (and starting Citybound in the first place) came from SimCity (2013), which, however, only implemented a very superficial version of that (modelling people more like fluids with sources and drains) Papers: Kim, D. (2012). Modelling Urban Growth : Towards an Agent Based Microeconomic Approach to Urban Dynamics and Spatial Policy Simulation
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